Strove to find a way to punch people in the face by using the Internet.

11/18/2003

DIARY OF INDIGNITIESMore Historical IndignitiesAge 8: I develop the bad habit of picking my nose and absent-mindedly flicking the boogers away while lying on my bed and reading. I more or less unconsciously continue this grotesque behavior until the day my dad pulls me into my room and angrily demands an explanation as to why there are six or seven huge, bloody, dried snot-wads stuck to the wall. The room seems to spin and recede and I am dimly aware, somewhere at the back of my mind, that making up a lie to cover this is beyond even my awesome powers. “Maybe I’m doing it in my sleep?” is the best I can come up with. My dad stares at me in disgust for a few moments and then walks away. Later, upon noticing that the booger wall is a good 12 feet from my bed, I’m quietly impressed that I managed that kind of range.

Age 9: Digging through my mom’s old albums, I discover Freak Out!, the first record by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention. I become enamored of side four, titled “The Return of the Son of Monster Magnet,” which features one 20-minute song consisting of little more than drumming and yelling. I bring it to school on “music day,” exciting the other members of my class, who see the words “freak out” and assume it’s the then-popular disco-pop hit of the same title by the band Chic. We make it through about six minutes before the teacher takes it off. Everyone just stares at me.

Age 10: I discover that I can very proficiently burp and talk at the same time. One day in science class, my teacher (the hated Mrs. Cruickshank, who a year later narked to the cops on me and my buddy Matt for making and detonating bombs in the woods next to her house) asks me for my folder. I burp out the words, “I left it at home,” and am sent to the office for the first time in my life. On the verge of tears, I wait to see the school principal and receive my inevitable paddling. He calls me in, and I sit quivering with fear across from him at his desk while he reads the slip detailing my transgression against society. He eventually looks up and starts to stare at me with a blank expression on his face. We sit there for a long time. He hands me back the slip and goes back to work, ignoring me. After a few minutes, I go back to class. He never says a word.

Age 16: Go to see D.C. hardcore band Scream (with Dave Grohl on drums!) at one of the local city-run recreation centers. Visiting the bathroom, I walk in on a conversation between a relatively friendly local skinhead and some out-of-town baldies. I overhear one of ‘em complaining about unwanted participants in “the scene” and ask, “What, you guys have to put up with a lot of rednecks and Nazis?” It suddenly becomes very quiet. Four large, bald and tattooed men turn to face me. I notice the Confederate flags and swastikas.

Age 17: Some magical combination of booze and luck lands me in bed with two gorgeous young women; my exceptionally tall, busty, blonde girlfriend and the petite, athletic redhead hosting the party happening outside her parents’ bedroom door. Actually, I’m in bed with three women, but one of ‘em is making out with my buddy Jon way over on the other side of the mattress, and the two of them split when they see things are kinda starting to heat up with us. I can’t get my girlfriend to fool around with the other girl, but have no complaints: I’m drunk, horny and on my way to experiencing my first-ever two-girl, one-me threesome, an event that’s obviously pretty much the Holy Grail for every idiot 17-year-old creep (not to mention every idiot 34-year-old creep). Things start to progress farther than I had ever dreamed possible (outside of various masturbatory fantasies anyway), and when the time is right I climb over and kneel between the tender legs of my gorgeous girlfriend as the redhead strokes my hair and looks on, mouth open and wet with expectation… And my girlfriend requests that I use a condom. So I stand up, rip the sheets off the bed to wrap myself and venture out into the party in search of a rubber while the girls giggle and await my return. I’m drunker’n Cooter Brown, ass hanging out of my makeshift toga and blind without my glasses, staggering around this wretched party and bumping into groups of disgusted jocks while desperately bellowing for a birth control. Someone takes pity on me and hands me a rubber, so I make haste back to the bedroom. Once again kneeling between those magical, silky thighs, I bring out the prophylactic, my key to nirvana, and begin making preparations. The wrapping on the thing was ripped, and it was half dried-out, but this would not dissuade me. My excited, inexperienced (yeah, like I was Burt Reynolds in the sack department) two girlfriends grabbing the condom and excitedly unrolling it before it could be properly applied didn’t help, nor did the case of whiskey-dick that had started to set in… After a few minutes of drunken, frantic attempts to cram this sticky, useless wad of plastic onto my half-hard dick, I keel over unconscious and start snoring, thereby ruining my one and only chance to ever make it into Penthouse Forum.

Age 20: Putting the plastic-wrapped candy canes in the microwave at my boss’s Christmas party? It was a bad idea.

Age 21: I get off from work at noon and spend the day drinking and throwing knives into the wall with two guys named Weasel and Chuck From Hell. After Chuck leaves, me and Weasel get into an argument. I spray him with some oven cleaner or something, and he spits on me in retaliation. I respond in kind and the next thing I know am engaged in a bona-fide spitting war. About a half hour later I am completely drunk and, for the first and only time in my life (as far as I know), covered from head to toe in another man’s saliva. Saliva from a man named Weasel. I have a date with a heart-stoppingly pretty girl that night, so I hop on my bike to go home and clean up. While riding into my yard at high speed, a steel support cable attached to a telephone pole catches me across the head and clotheslines me off of my bike. I dust myself off, laugh and proceed to making myself as presentable as possible. Later, after a few glasses of wine, my intelligent, delightful, sexy date and I recline on the grass at a private little spot in a local park and stare up at the full moon. She looks over, smiles and asks me how I got the red welt across my forehead. Laughing, I tell her the whole story, spittle and all. Suffice to say I do not get laid that night. Days later, when I call her at work, I’m told she’s not there. I can hear her and her coworkers in the background, laughing at me.

Age 23: If you’re going to fire a bottle rocket into a full can of beer, don’t do it in the house.

Age 24: I stumble in the door at three in the morning, drunk, and find four or five friends and roommates watching a porno video. Bleary and off-balance, I brace myself on the wall and glance at the screen, which features an attractive young lady coughing and choking as she forces a big, lumpy weiner all the way down her throat, and boast, “Aw, I can do that!” before passing out. I wake up with no memory of this incident. My roommates, however, recall it in great detail. And often.

Age 26: Planning to fry up some okra, I put a bunch of oil in a pan, throw it on the stove and crank the heat to “high.” The phone rings, and I get into this extended long-distance conversation, no doubt on a really important topic like how awesome Black Flag was in ’84 or something. I totally forget about the stove until some time later, when I walk back to the front of the apartment and am bathed in a thick, black smoke. Through it I can see the pan, which is glowing red-hot and beginning to sag. The oil has totally evaporated, generating the foul, clinging fog that’s coating my kitchen with soot. I somehow manage to take care of the situation before my apartment bursts into flame and kills everyone on the block, and spend a little time trying to clean the oily muck off of my kitchen cabinets. The pan is half-melted and totally fucked. After a while, I decide dealing with the mess isn’t worth the effort and ride my bike to the market to buy some replacement supper. Walking around, I notice a cute girl glance at me, do a double take and then give me a big smile. I smile back, nod and continue to shop, swaggering around and grinning at everyone, convinced I’m the stud of the supermarket. I shuck and jive over to produce, which has mirrors on the walls above the various vegetables, and catch my reflection. My hair is standing on end and my face is covered in greasy, black ash.

Age 27: I spend a lot of time holding up the bar at local Irish pub Durty Nelly’s. I didn’t think I was spending THAT much time there until one late afternoon, when the phone rings. Sadly, it’s for me. And it’s long-distance.

Ages 28-34: Nothing! Nothing but smoooooth sailing through the calm, pleasant seas of social propriety! I am accepted for who I am and respected, godammit!

11/15/2003

I've been too busy with mundane stuff to actually go out and do anything painful or embarrassing, so in this site's grand tradition of me recycling shit I wrote three years ago, I present:

ORGY OF MEAT

It could have turned ugly real fast. I was lightheaded and underfed. The night before I had drank too much and stayed up too late. As I tried to keep my car on the road the air was filling with the irresistible odor of slow-cooked meats... Slow-cooked meats drenched in a variety of tangy, spicy sauces...

The atmosphere in the car was palpably thickening, becoming a tangible entity redolent with the savory aromas of wood-smoke, charred beef and the savory goodness of homestyle barbecue sauce... I blacked out... Swerved... If Molly Hatchet's "Gator Country" hadn't come on the radio and given me a momentary jolt of strength I honestly don't know if I would have made it.

But make it I did. And Jim and Jason were there, waiting with wide eyes and empty stomachs. "Let's eat ourselves into a rib coma," Jim says.

Now before we get too far into this I'm inclined to throw out a disclaimer. Lots of hardcore barbecue (“BBQ” from here on in) heads out there aren't going to like this story, because while I want to eat all of it I frankly don't give two shits about what proponents of this or that regional style have to say.

For those who haven't run across one of these blowhards, here’s what talking to them is like: "Only BBQ from Texas is real BBQ. We take beef brisket and slow-cook it for a minimum of eight years and chop it and eat it off butcher paper while standing in piles of cow shit and we only use a sweet, tomato-based sauce on the side. Look at me, I'm from Texas and I'm so cool and I'm wearing pointy boots. Pointy, pointy boots."

Or, "The only real BBQ is of Carolina extraction: pork shoulder smoked over wood from a huckleberry tree. Sauce where I'm from is pepper and vinegar and if you eat anything else you might as well hold hands with Osama Bin Laden. Now if you'll excuse me I think a hurricane has blown my Datsun into a lake and I must retrieve it and send it to Florida for resale purposes."

My response? "If either of y'all get a hand in between me and dinner your friends are gonna be calling you stumpy." I mean, do you want to eat meat or do you want to get into a pissing contest over details? People who get hung up on this stuff should quit reading this right now and go to a Star Trek convention or something. ‘Cause you take something good and pure and natural and talk about it like you’re the Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons.

So we’re going to eat some local BBQ here and talk about it. Instead of the panel of BBQ enthusiasts and local cultural figures I had originally envisioned for this story you get the opinions of Jason Rockhill and Jim Wells. Jason is the vocalist for local punk band Unitas and the tour manager for Hot Water Music. He has yet to realize that chicken is a vegetable. Jim plays video games and takes naps and is a Yankee. Add me to the equation and you’re not exactly coming up with a panel of experts here, but that’s OK.

And we’re sticking to just ribs here – nothing fancy. We’re not talking about side dishes, chicken or sandwiches. And we’re not going to talk about franchises like Bono’s or Sonny’s. Those places are fine, but they’re high-profile enough that most people inclined to partake in some BBQ have already made up their minds about ‘em. And while I’m sure there are plenty of hidden, home-grown treasures dotting the local landscape (I passed one across from the Main Street Publix just a few days ago) finances and convenience limited our survey to Terrell’s Bar-B-Que, Ricardo George’s Florida Style Bar-B-Que, Homestyle Bar-B-Q and David’s Real Pit BBQ. Just deal with it.

So Jason, Jim and I sit down to eat. Luscious, glistening meats cover every inch of the table. It’s a little bit daunting – where to begin? But after a few seconds of quiet reflection carnage ensues.

I had kind of expected lively conversation and insightful commentary during our meal but mostly there was just a lot of grunting. What little discussion actually took place I might not accurately be able to recreate from my sauce-stained notes, but I ain’t afraid to make stuff up. So here goes.

“The meat’s a little tough, though,” Jim says. He affects a look of disappointment that clashes with the fearsome velocity with which he strips the meat from the bone. “I kind of wish there was more meat on it, too.” The fact that he essentially inhales another rib while making these comments leads me to believe that he is trying to dissuade Jason and I from trying the Ricardo George’s so he can keep it all for himself.

I try a bite. It’s good. The sauce is unique – it’s a thick, creamy orange color and has a flavor not far removed from roasted peppers. The meat really isn’t as tender as I would like it to be, though.

“Hmmm. This David’s is nothing special,” Jason says.

“Yeah, it’s kind of bland,” Jim says.

“There’s no sauce on it,” I say. “Put some damn sauce on it.” I take a bite of a sauce-less rib. It has a rich, meaty taste. Probably the most concentrated meat flavor out of all of them.

“The meat is good. It almost tastes grilled. It’s like steak,” Jason says. “It doesn’t really taste as smoky as the others.”

“Not as smoky!?” I say. “Try this piece here…”

“Oh yeah, now I taste it. Let me try another piece of that Dave’s. I usually like sweet sauce better than mustard but this is really good,” Jason says.

“Yeah, the mustard gives it a little sack,” Jim says.

“Sack?” I say. “As in ‘ball sack?’”

“Yeah,” Jim says. Why ‘ball sack’ would be a positive thing to find in your BBQ is beyond my understanding. As are many things about Yankees.

“Try some of this Terrell’s, you guys,” I say. Terrell’s ribs are smothered in a thick, tangy tomato-based sauce. “To me, this is just a classic style BBQ.”

“Mmmmph. Ummm. Terrell’s rules,” Jim says.

“But that Homestyle’s is really different. The meat there is always really good, and that sauce tastes almost Jamaican,” I say. “What do you think that is? Tamarind?”

“My grandmom makes a Jamaican pot roast that almost has the same kind of flavor,” Jason says.

“Mmmph. I think the Homestyle’s might be my favorite,” Jim says. “Oooh. I just got a really good Terrell’s.”

Recently I saw three lost Yankees order some food at Terrell’s. “I want some fries,” one of them said. A guy in line started laughing.

“So, umm, what different kinds of ribs do you have? Ummm… Spare ribs?” Asked the lead Yankee.

“Just… Ribs,” the bewildered girl at the order window said. She looked at him like he was nuts. After receiving his order he asked for a fork. Then the Yankees started taking pictures of each other like the rib truck was some goddamn ride at Disney World. Jackasses.

All of the ribs come with a few slices of white bread. With all of the meat vaporized the bread suddenly starts looking pretty good. After all, they’ve been soaking in sauce and juices during the fifteen minutes or so it took us to decimate the twenty pounds of meat that once sat in front of us. “Jim, are you going to eat that last slice of Ricardo George’s bread?” I say.

“No. You want it?” Jim says.

“No. I want to see you eat it,” I say.

“There’s still meat to go around, son,” Jim says, picking up the last shred of David’s.

“Spoken like a naturalized Southerner,” I say.

“Spoken like a guy that rode in the back of a pickup truck for the first time last week,” Jason says.

“I tell you, after watching you guys eat all that I don’t feel so guilty about that second bowl of cereal,” Alex says. He is clearly insane.

It’s hard for me to pass any kind of final judgement on the food. Each BBQ has its own style, its own strengths and weaknesses. Maybe Jim or Jason have a clear favorite… “So how do you guys feel? Do you want to sum it all up?” I say.

“Shhh… I feel… High,” Jim says. “Oops. I just stepped on a plate full of sauce. I think that if you could put Ricardo George’s sauce on Homestyle’s meat it would be my favorite.”

“All of them were good. What days are Homestyle’s and Terrell’s open? Thursday, Friday and Saturday?” Jason says. “I think the moral of the story is you eat BBQ Thursday, Friday and Saturday.”

11/06/2003

DIARY OF INDIGNITIESAugust 11, 1992: Sometimes in life it’s necessary to let a motherfucker stick a razorblade in your eye. Really.

Ah, I sense your skepticism. Please allow me to explain.

I have an uncle-in-law who’s a builder. Back in the early ‘90s he would occasionally employ me for odd jobs at his various construction sites. Because I didn’t have a car, he’d pick up me and my hangover, drive me to a worksite while talking about Jesus, drop me off and leave me to do stuff like smash up pesky chunks of cement or sweep up the beer cans, burger wrappers and crack pipes left by his crews.

I like this uncle. He’s kind of like a cross between Ned Flanders and G. Gordon Liddy. The house where him, my aunt and their two kids live is chock full of flavorless religious health food, wall hangings stitched with inspirational homilies and the kind of Christian analogues to secular pop-culture items that make me feel like I’m standing on the edge of a deep, dark hole. Did you know they made a board game out of What Would Jesus Do? Or that you can buy a Noah “action” figure? Or that Bible Trivia was released in a portable version? Those kids are going to grow up to be axe murderers.

My aunt and uncle are also always involved in some pseudo-religious Amway-styled scam or another. My uncle would always have some entertaining, cockamamie endorsement of some damn thing or another to share, like when he was on this preposterous blue-green algae kick.

“You know, I was puttin’ up a fence the other day, and a piece of the post snapped,” he once started telling me. “The tension from the wire swung that post around, and it ended up smacking me in the arm real hard.”

“Really?”

“Yup. And you know what I did?”

“Nope. What?”

“I made me a poultice out of some of that blue-green algae and put it right on the spot where the post hit. It didn’t even bruise. Now, this thing hit me hard enough to almost break the bone, but I didn’t get a mark on me. Blue-green algae. That is some wild stuff.”

“Wow,” I’d say, while thinking, “Shut the fuck up.”

This is the same uncle-in-law that was responsible for one of my favorite Christmas memories. A few years back, we had convened at his place to open presents. He was telling me about the radical construction materials he had used to build the place, including plumbing made entirely of blue-green algae, and invited me upstairs to take a look at some exciting new insulation. Well, I’m hardly one to turn down a chance to check out some insulation, so I followed him up to the attic.

He grabbed a handful of this stuff that looked like the weird powdery cardboard material in padded envelopes that gets everywhere if you open ‘em wrong and spread it out on his palm. Then he put a penny on top of the material, grabbed a blowtorch and melted the goddamn penny. I mean he melted that fucker. Right in his hand.

Then he asked me if I liked brandy, and we went down to the garage to drink some he had stashed out there, away from the womenfolk. I noticed a big, wooden board in the corner that had a bunch of knives sticking out of it.

“Oh, those are my throwing knives. It’s a great stress-reliever,” he said, then started giving me a demo. Thwok! Thwok!

“Hey,” he said, “Do you like guns?”

“Sure!”

He unlocked a trunk that contained dozens of pistols and started pulling out a few of his favorites.

So I’m standing there next to a board full of throwing knives, holding a gun and a glass of booze, and my mom calls out to the garage to ask me to take her home. Shit... Just when I was starting to feel all Christmas-y.

The whole eyeball thing started when this uncle hired me to lay some sod at one of his job sites. While wearing contacts, I had got a chunk of the stuff in my eye. I just wiped it out and kept working. I slept in those contacts, and the next day woke up startled to see my eyes shot through with an intricate network of bright red, tiny veins. At first I was hoping that this was the fulfillment of a lifelong wish; that I had finally been granted the ability to make things burst into flame just by staring at them. But it was not the case.

I peeled the contacts off of my eyeballs and tried to get on with my life, but I could tell something had gone horribly awry. My eyes were itchy, turning redder by the minute (I estimate at least .7 on the Tommy Chong scale) and extremely sensitive to light. I always hate it when a formerly compliant body part turns rogue on me, and the fact that I use my eyes fairly often made this whole thing pretty disconcerting.

So the next day I visit that paragon of advanced medical technique, the University of Florida infirmary. Now, I had visited the infirmary plenty of times before, but never as a patient (the infirmary’s where college girls go to get their Chlamydia cleared up, so it’s a good place to meet chicks that are willing to, you know, “do it”).

After a bit of the usual stuff anyone has to go through when visiting a doctor (you know – sitting in the waiting room for three hours, filling out questionnaires, signing release forms absolving the clinic of responsibility after they accidentally graft a hamster head onto the side of your neck, having a gallon or two of blood needlessly drained, having a few different people stick their fingers in your butt, becoming increasingly restless as various screams, gasps and desperate pleas for mercy echo down the hallway), I was sent to see a nurse. She put down her cigarette, took one look at me and pronounced that I had pink eye.

I was skeptical. “I’ve had pink eye before, and this sure doesn’t feel like pink eye. Are you sure?”

“Yes... Well, no. We’ll perform a few more tests, just in case.”

I was ushered into a room filled with the latest medical technology, circa whenever Dr. Frankenstein stitched that Herman Munster dude with the square head together. They strapped me onto one of those Frankenstein boards, spun me around a few times, punched me in the face, cackled, threw a few of those big wall switches, fired up the antenna thingy with the little lightning bolts and shined some really bright lights in my eyes. As the winds outside howled and the roar of the thunder built to a hellish crescendo I passed out, and when I woke up there were pictures of me on the Internet naked and getting a blowjob from what appeared to be Ernest Borgnine. They also said my eye condition was beyond their understanding, and I should hoof it over to Shands Hospital like pronto to see just what the fuck was wrong with me.

Shands is a fun place. You can walk around in there and see all kinds of weird shit you’ll wish you never saw, like two-headed babies in jars. I had just finished a summer job there, Xeroxing gigantic, wasteful stacks of paper designed to ensure the daily dumpster-capacity quota was met. While I spent a lot of time at that gig freaking out secretaries by sticking paper clips through my recently abandoned nose-ring hole, I had overheard a thing or two about sick people getting better there, so I figured Shands would fix me up right.

Well, Shands is the kind of place you want to go if a tornado drives a coat hanger through your skull or some weird bug crawls into your ear and lays its eggs in your brain. But it’s a teaching hospital, so unless you’ve contracted something really interesting from a meteor or you’re holding your brain in with duct tape, the real doctors can’t be bothered with you and will send out some medical students or residents to practice on you some.

During the check-in, I had a conversation with a resident that went like this:

“Mr. Hughes, are you allergic to any medicines?”

“Yeah, penicillin.”

“What happens when you take it?”

“Huh?”

“I said, ‘What happens when you take it?’”

“Uhhh, I dunno. I’m allergic… So I don’t take it.”

“You don’t know what happens when you take it?”

“No, I don’t know, motherfucker! Maybe I sprout wings and fly away!”

Someone snuck up behind me at this point and whacked me across the back of the head with one of those big reflex-testing mallets, knocking me unconscious. When I woke up, there were pictures on the Internet of me wearing a Speedo and getting dangled over a balcony by Michael Jackson, and the resident said I had some kind of grisly, sod-induced infection on the surface of my cornea. They were going to have to scrape my eye to clean out the infection.

Scrape my eye.

So they put a few drops of an anesthetic in my eye. I had to sit in this chair and stick my chin on one of those things that eye doctors use when they’re torturing you with that air-puff glaucoma thing. They turn the lights out, shine a beam into my left eye, and a guy pulls out this disposable scalpel with a blade pretty much exactly like one of those X-acto knives.

And starts scraping. Scraping my fucking eye.

I had always thought of my eyeballs as being kind of squishy, like a pair of jelly donuts or silicone implants or something that’d just pop and spew eye-juice everywhere if you poked ‘em too hard. But the surface of my eye provided a surprising amount of resistance. I could feel the keen edge of the scalpel pressing into my eyeball, as well as see its shadow moving across my field of vision.

Chances are that unless you’re picking this site up on a metal plate in your head you’re sitting at a computer right now. To get an idea of the noise and texture of this scraping, dig your fingernail into the edge of your keyboard and pull it toward you. Now imagine someone doing it to your fucking eye, cutting through the tiny, moist layer of surface gelatin to grind at the brittle goods underneath… Scrape, scrape, scrape… Scrape, scrape, scrape…

They did it to me for what was 20 of the longest minutes of my life.

And that wasn’t even the last indignity they were going to visit upon me. They loaded me up with a bunch of eye-salves and drops and shit, and informed me that I’d have to apply ‘em around the clock for a few days. The catch was I had to wait two full minutes between applications, which meant that I’d get up at four in the morning or whenever, put some drops in, try to focus on the clock for two minutes while hallucinating rows of soft, comfy beds dancing around me and listening to fluffy, imaginary pillows seductively whispering my name. I honestly spent more than a few minutes wondering if having eyesight was even worth this bullshit.

After a few days of this exquisite torture I went back to the hospital. My eye sockets had swelled up, the actual eyeballs were still as red as a baboon’s ass and some kind of foul jism was seeping from my tear ducts. The resident gave me a pill that made me dizzy, and I passed out. When I woke up, there were pictures of me on the Internet wearing a Catholic school girl’s uniform and a saddle while getting ridden around the room by a very excited-looking Al Roker. I also overheard this conversation:

“Doctor, we called you in because this guy’s eye is all evil and puffy, and it’s seeping some kind of wretched goo. We can’t figure out why”

“It says here you gave him penicillin-derived eyedrops. But his records say he’s allergic to penicillin. Why in the hell did you prescribe him that stuff after he told you he was allergic to penicillin?!”

“Uh, we didn’t believe him.”

“Didn’t believe him?!”

“He said he’s sprout wings and fly away.”

Well, the fuckers eventually got it all straightened out, and I retained the use of my eyes. And I have to admit, the experience did have a few positive aspects: I got to wear a cool, pirate-y eyepatch for a couple of weeks, even though I never really needed it, and I got a blowjob from Ernest Borgnine. Apparently.